This darkly tropical setting combines images from African tribal sculpture and Afro-Cuban deities and rituals with references to slavery in Cuba, including sugar cane and prostitution. During World War II Lam went to Martinique, where he strongly identified with Negritude, a movement that flourished in the 1940s. Lam became the most important painter associated with the movement, which protested the suppression of black culture in the colonized West Indies. Near the Virgin Islands is emblematic of Negritude’s celebration of authentic sources in its assured use of the linear, highly stylized pictorial forms found in African sculpture.